About timecode



The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) establishes a set of cooperating standards that are used to label individual frames of video and film with pertinent information. These standards are referred to as SMPTE timecode. SMPTE timecode consists of binary-coded strings of 80 bits that contain information about the hour, minute, second, and frame (expressed as HH:MM:SS:FF), the type of timecode (non-drop or drop-frame), and 32 user-definable bits.

Flash Media Live Encoder can extract SMPTE timecode that is generated by compatible devices, embed it into the encoded video stream, and pass it to Flash Media Server. You can save that stream locally as an FLV file or F4V file. Subscribing clients that connect to the published stream can get the embedded timecode information.

In addition, Flash Media Live Encoder 3 can embed the system time from the encoding computer as AMF data tags. The system time can substitute for a timecode if your capture device doesn’t generate timecode.

    Supported timecode devices

    Flash Media Live Encoder does not generate SMPTE timecode, but it can extract timecode. Use a compatible capture device and timecode DLL to generate timecode information. Flash Media Live Encoder can extract timecode from devices that use an MSDV driver. Your Flash Media Live Encoder installation includes a timecode DLL for MSDV devices.

    Supported timecode formats

    For timecode generated by a capture device, Flash Media Live Encoder can extract timecode in the following formats:

    Vertical Interval Timecode
    (VITC) is recorded into the vertical blanking interval (VBI) of the video signal.

    Burnt-in Timecode
    (BITC) burns numbers into the video image, making the timecode human-readable.